Which Samsung SSD to replace my old 265GB SSD??

[NY2KW]

I have a HP z840 workstation that came with a Samsung MZVPV256HDGL SSD.  Drive is near full and time for an upgrade with a 512GB for a fresh Windows 10 install.




I see there is a Samsung MZVPV512HDGL which should be a direct replacement but I also see that there are newer Samsung SSDs that seem to have the same motherboard edge connector -970 EVO Plus or 970 Pro and these have faster specs.   Anyone one know if these are interchangeable with my original SSD?

thanks in advance
Jerry

[aix]

The keywords you're looking for are "M.2 NVMe".  Any of those should work, including Samsung 970 lines.  Intel also makes good drives (I've been using a 760p in my laptop with great results).

[aix]

I don't know if Amazon pricing is representative, but $249 for MZVPV512HDGL is nuts (is basically double what I'd consider reasonable):

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-SM951-512GB-NVMe-MZVPV512HDGL-00000/dp/B015CWR4M2

[edavid]

I don't know if Amazon pricing is representative, but $249 for MZVPV512HDGL is nuts (is basically double what I'd consider reasonable):

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-SM951-512GB-NVMe-MZVPV512HDGL-00000/dp/B015CWR4M2

It's an obsolete MLC SSD, so it costs much more than current TLC SSDs.   It might be worth it if you need the write endurance.

[Whales]

Be wary of the capabilities of your M.2 connector.  Some are wired to SATA, some PCIE (for NVME), others both.

Also be wary of the space/screw-hole availability inside your device.  Some M.2 sticks are longer than others.

Generally speaking: M.2 sticks seem to be more expensive versus their SATA counterparts.  This might also reflect them being better performance, but I have no experience or info to support that.

[edavid]

Be wary of the capabilities of your M.2 connector.  Some are wired to SATA, some PCIE (for NVME), others both.

Since his existing SSD is NVMe, the connector obviously supports that 

[wraper]

You don't need Samsung SSD. All you need is m.2 nvme SSD. I recommend ADATA XPG SX8200 pro because they are almost as fast as top end Samsung but much cheaper. They are among the most energy efficient SSD. Also there does not seem to be any problem reports, nor had I any problems with them and they have 5 year warranty.

[Berni]

It's an obsolete MLC SSD, so it costs much more than current TLC SSDs.   It might be worth it if you need the write endurance.

MLC is the actually the superior flash technology.

For example have a comparison between the two popular samsung M.2 PCIe drives:
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/consumer/970pro/
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/consumer/970evo/

The cheaper EVO uses TLC flash technology while the more expensive PRO version uses the old MLC technology. Notice that the advertised speeds are pretty much the same between both of them. So why would you buy the more expensive PRO model with old MLC when the performance is identical to the cheaper EVO model? Only reason you would pay extra is for the privilege of getting MLC flash.

MLC(Multi Level Cell) is a successor to the SLC(Single Level Cell) technology. Where SLC used to store a binary 1 or 0 in a cell the MLC flash would store 4 analog levels in a cell in order to fit 2 bits in one flash cell. This allows for twice as much information to be stored in the same number of cells (And so the same silicon die area). So with the push for more capacity TLC (Tripple Level Cell) flash technology was introduced that uses 8 analog levels to store 3 bits in one flash cell. This provides 50% more capacity but makes it 2x as likely for a bit to get corrupted compared to MLC. The tech keeps marching on and now QLC (Quad level cell) technology are being mass produced making data corruption 400% more likely compared to MLC.

So the reason why you want MLC is that you get more reliable data storage but not sacrifice performance, but it is more expensive due to requiring more silicon die area for the same amount of storage capacity. You can also still buy SLC flash SSDs but they are ridiculously expensive as they are only used in specialized applications where reliability is critical.

[Psi]

+1 for Intel

[Berni]

Oh and in terms of performance you are not going to notice much difference between old SATA SSD (~300MB/s sequential) and a fancy high speed PCIe SSD (~5000MB/s)

In day to day desktop use it all feels quick and snappy since SSDs have near instant seek times versus mechanical drives that have to move the head. Typical desktop apps don't move enough data quantity for sequential speed to matter. Only places where you do notice faster drives is copying large files, slight improvement in load times in games, slightly faster boot time(by only a few %), specific applications that move huge amounts of data to disk and back as a cache etc... But a fast PCIe SSD is generally not going to make Photoshop, Word, Firefox, Chrome load any faster, make GCC compile C code faster.. etc

So just get something from a reputable brand (Samsung, Crucial, Adata, Intel...) because data loss sucks

[wraper]

+1 for Intel

Intel what? There are different models. For the same money I'd rather buy something like ADATA with TLC rather than Intel with crappy QLC nand.

[Kjelt]

Does your laptop have the option to install a secondary SSD in the drivebay or other place ?
If you have that option it might be worth while investigating that.
Since for data storage you do not need the extra x4 speed increase that M2 offers and the price of a 1 TB SATA SSD are quite low.
I try to differ between programs /OS and data as much as possible , it also makes upgrading/changing the OS in the future much easier.

[NY2KW]

Thank you to all for the thoughtful and helpful replies.  I got a good price for a 1 Tb Samsung 970 Evo Plus.  It is an exact footprint replacement and my HP workstation PCIe slot is Gen3 x4 lanes so I believe it will work fine.  I did a fresh install of Windows 10 and its nice to see  all of that free space :-).   I have a 2 TB RAID 5 in the same workstation and everything gets backed up.  I was surprised to read that these SSD have only about a 5y life in a high-use environment.   

[wraper]

I was surprised to read that these SSD have only about a 5y life in a high-use environment.

High use (whatever it means) = 5 years is nonsense. SSD have actual TBW number. 50% less writes = 2 times longer life. So estimating lifetime with no actual data written amount is simply useless.

[NY2KW]

Per Samsung:

Samsung states that their Samsung SSD 850 PRO SATA, with a capacity of 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 or 1 TB,  is “built to handle 150 terabytes written (TBW), which equates to a 40 GB daily read/write workload over a ten-year period.”  Samsung even promises that the product is “withstanding up to 600 terabytes written (TBW).”    A normal office user writes approximately between 10 and 35 GB on a normal day. Even if one raises this amount up to 40 GB, it means that they could write (and only write) more than almost 5 years until they reach the 70 TBW limit.

[rdl]

... between 10 and 35 GB on a normal day.

? !!!

I bet I don't hit that in a month of normal usage.

[Kjelt]

You have the Samsung Magician app to monitor your ssd health.
If you need more TBW you can go to the pro drives that are used in datacenters.

[Berni]

At least modern OSes do try to be nice to drives by not instantly writing stuff to them. So applications that like to constantly fiddle a few bytes of a file don't end up constantly making the SSD rewrite entire its internal flash pages the size of kilobytes. Instead that stays in RAM caches and only gets flushed once space is needed.

What is increasingly becoming a problem with flash memory is bit rot. As they pack more analog levels into cells and shrink the cells  it becomes more and more likely for charge to leak away and change state. Yes there has been ECC in flash from ever since NAND flash got into the 100s of MB but it can only correct so many errors. Tho i think the controller should be smart enough to move pages that experience ECC errors on reading, so as long as the data is read out often enough it should be fine as the errors wouldn't pile up enough to be unrecoverable.

[Psi]

+1 for Intel

Intel what? There are different models. For the same money I'd rather buy something like ADATA with TLC rather than Intel with crappy QLC nand.

Intel SSD's overall seem to have lower failure rates in my experience.
So my vote is for anything intel based, you are of course free to make up your own mind
The failures on SSDs seem to be more about the chipset programming getting messed up due to bugs and losing track of what data is where. The actual flash chips dying seems less common (assuming you dont exceed the write cycle count).

A modern SSD isn't storing data in a nice easy to read back format. It's super complex with data spread out all over the place. Then it uses very complex formulas, indexes and speed optimization code to figure out what data is where and quickly reassemble it for you when requested.

The complexity and optimization being added by manufactures to make 'their' SSD better than the competition (often using the same physical NAND chips) means it is WAY to easy for a firmware bug to get into the chipset. The bugs tend to be edge cases that don't happen very often and only get discovered after release.

I trust intel to write better firmware than the other vendors who try to push speeds the max and i'm more worried about firmware quality than the NAND chip type TLC MLC QLC etc.